Henry Baltazar's Blog

Seagate's recent Kinetic Open Storage platform unveiling is making hard drive based technology interesting again. The Kinetic platform essentially turns hard drives into individual key value stores, and allows applications and hosts to directly access Kinetic drives over TCP/IP networks. Processing power within the drives is used to run the key value store, and the Kinetic technology also facilitates policy based drive-to-drive data migration. If this storage architecture is commercially successful it will be extraordinarly disruptive since the direct connectivity from drives to applications will eliminate storage controllers, file systems, SANs and even RAID from the storage data path. Developer kits for Kinetic are available today, though Seagate will not be making the drives generally available until 2014. I'll be publishing a more in-depth report for Forrester clients on our site in the future, but for now there are a number of key points to be aware of as this technology ramps up: